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The First Sales Hire at a Startup

Background

Coaching call (30 mins) with someone who is currently in B2B tech sales and has the opportunity to join a seed stage B2B SaaS startup as their first salesperson.

  • Founder/CEO of the company is currently doing the sales and doesn’t have previous sales experience.

  • CEO hasn’t established a sales process or implemented any sales tools.

  • It sounds like the CEO isn’t really quite sure what they need for this first sales hire. They know they need someone who can sell, build the sales process, and hire early sales team members.

  • CEO stated that the role could be a Senior Account Executive or Director of Sales. The role sounds like it would be a BDR, AE, AM, and sales leader role all combined (redefining full cycle sales haha).

  • The startup has a product/service that is very similar to what my coachee is currently selling.

  • My coachee is excited about the opportunity but has a lot of uncertainty because they have always been an individual contributor and don’t have prior experience as a sales manager or sales leader.

Coachee’s Question

“Where do I begin? What do I do first for building out the Sales team and sales process?”

My Advice

1. Job Title

Ensure that you have clarity on what your job title will be and that it reflects your roles, responsibilities, and the expectations that they have of you. I often hear stories about salespeople joining startups and having all of the sales responsibilities of a Director of Sales with but a relatively junior title.

Sometimes people are scared to push for the appropriate title. And they join companies thinking that this will sort itself out eventually. This is a recipe for misalignment and future resentments. Sometimes these things do sort themselves out. Sometimes they don’t.

Being offered a sales role with responsibilities that are bigger than the title does not necessarily reflect poorly on the Founder. I do a lot of coaching with Founders and most of them don’t have a background in sales. Oftentimes they don’t know what the right title should be and are very open to giving the role the appropriate one.

Joining a seed-stage tech company as the first salesperson involves significant risks. You’re putting your faith in the business and will be pouring a lot of yourself into it. They need to put their faith in you and invest in you too.

Get the right title.

Note: getting the right title also has important implications for compensation. But we didn’t discuss that in our call.

2. What do I do first to build the Sales team and sales process?

Step #1: Get a CRM and setup the basics

  • My coachee had only ever used Salesforce. So I gave a recommendation and a bit of background on why.

  • Strongly recommend HubSpot. Which is very popular amongst startups because:

    • It’s a good sales CRM and relatively inexpensive.

    • It contains almost everything that you need (e.g. sequences) so that you don’t have to add a laundry list of other tools to your tech stack (yes, shots fired Salesforce).

    • It is very easy to customize. You don’t need to have a strong technical background, developers, sales operations people, or an outside consulting firm help you (yes, shots fired Salesforce).

Step #2: Create the initial sales process

  • Building a Sales process from scratch can be daunting. Sometimes things are so new and ambiguous that it’s hard to know where to begin.

  • Remember that is just a first iteration of many. Something to be refined and changed (or maybe completely overhauled) over time… especially in the early days. This will not be your final sales process.

  • Think about what needs to happen from Lead to Closed Won. Think about what might be some of the key milestones in the sales cycle, the pipeline stages, and the sales activities.

  • Bring learnings from your previous experiences. Sales methodologies can also be really helpful here. Startup Sales leaders need to bring a mindset of experimentation.

  • Map this out the sales process in HubSpot.

Step #3: Get the inbound leads into the CRM

  • It was unclear on what the startup’s lead volume is. Likely relatively low. Currently all of the leads are just going to the CEO’s email.

  • Old leads can be added to HubSpot individually or in bulk with a .csv file.

  • For new leads, create a lead form that automatically adds them to HubSpot (see: HubSpot Form Builder).

Step #4: Setup the rest of your tech stack.

  • Video Conferencing

    • Recommendation: Teams. I prefer Zoom but if your prospect’s are Enterprise clients they are likely using Teams internally.

  • Video Call Recording Software

    • Recommendation: Clari Copilot. I use and prefer Gong but it’s cost prohibitive for small Sales teams.

    • A lot of early stage startups don’t record their calls! It’s really important that you do. Recording your calls is very important for self-coaching and coaching, learning, referencing during the sales cycle, refining your playbook, training your new sales hires, sharing with your colleagues (e.g. Product, Marketing, and Customer Success)… AND they’re hilarious to look back on years later after you’ve done your Series A, Series B, etc.

  • Phone System

    • Recommend: I don’t have any strong recommendations for a small team. There’s lots of good, inexpensive choices.

    • Note: any that you look at will likely include call recording.

  • Integrate these tools with your CRM

    • Note: this is really easy to do if you’re using HubSpot.

Step #5: Get on Sales Calls

  • Learn who your prospects are. What’s their persona? What are their pain points?

  • Helpful for refining the sales process and to create your first Sales playbook.

  • You’ll have a stronger sense of who would be a good fit when hiring for your Sales team. You can answer questions like:

    • Will this person connect with our prospects?

    • Will this person do well with a shorter/longer sales cycle?

    • Will this person do well with a technical sale?

  • Helpful for attracting the recruits you want! You can talk about, and answer questions on, your sales experiences at the company so far, you can get them excited, you can instill confidence in their decision (they’re taking a risk too!), and can answer candidate questions about your sales stats.

  • It’s hard to onboard new hires if you can’t demonstrate knowledge and proficiency.

  • It’s hard to coach salespeople if you don’t have shared experiences, real empathy for what it means to be a salesperson at your company, and real empathy for your prospects.

  • It’s hard to lead salespeople if you can’t demonstrate mastery and inspire confidence.

There are TONS of things to do when you’re the first salesperson at a company. I like to tackle the early foundational tactical and operational items that I talked about above first. Then I move on to strategy and hiring!

Additional Resources